Does anyone have experience with defense contractors? They are a big recruiter of CS grads in San Diego. I would like to know your experience versus working at a tech shop or a corporate IT shop.
I work at a defense contractor now (and have worked in a tech shop and corporate IT before).
The main problem I've found in defense contracting is that it isn't flexible, and (in my opinion) too many design decisions are made at too high a level. Details that don't really matter (what implementation of X we're going to use in development, for example) are decided (and made effectively immutable) before it makes sense to do so by people not actually doing the coding. To be fair, I've only been around for a month (and this is just my experience with one contract), so take it with a pinch of salt.
Corporate IT, in my opinion, is pretty boring. There were two of us supporting ~500 users across the world (offices in Chicago, NY, LA, London, etc), and I still had a lot of down time. We had some simple tools that took care of 90% of our work (re-imaging, backups, data migration, etc), and the rest were a lot of reasonably easy one-off jobs (simple tool to parse excel reports, load monitioring webapps, etc) or product evaluation (Evaluate these n products, talk to these 2n vendors (sorry, 'solution providers'), and write a report on your recommendation). There were one or two reasonably interesting projects (a 'visual voicemail' feature hacked onto our avaya phone system and some genetic algorithms for scheduling a conference), but they were the exception. Far more time on the phone talking to end users and vendors than I would like.
